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EDWARD D. WORRELL. 45

iar with its manifestations, If there be one subject within
the circle of disease which more than another tasks and taxes
the human mind, it is the subject of insanity. This is the
opinion of every author who has written upon it, of every
medical jurisprudent, of every keeper of lunatic asylums, of
every man who professes to have learned by study anything
of the manifestation or phenomena of mental disorder, with-
out exeeption; and yet my friend exclaims, ‘‘Does not every .
person know an insane man when he sees himt”’

I wish it were so! I wish the most perplexing as well ag
the most important of all metaphysical inquiries, upon the
proper solution of which life, liberty and reputation often
depend, could be infalliby answered by a look. ‘‘It is a con-
summation devoutly to be wished ;’’ but I fear it is not in the
order of Providence.

A very distinguished jurist of Pennsylvania, the late Chief
Justice Gibson, while deploring the ignorance of English
julges and English authors on the subject of insanity, and
denouncing the special unfitness of the House of Lords to de-
termine the legal rules and psychological tests of the disease,
‘attered the hope that the day was not distant when insanity,
in all ita phases and types, would be as well understood,
and as successfully treated, as ordinary bilious fever. His
reliance, however, was not based upon the magic of a book,
the panacea of a glance, but upon the combined observations
and seientific toil of the finest minds of England, France, Con-
tinental Europe and America, directed patiently and watch-
fully to the detection and classification of the phenomena of
the disease. The age is favorable to the investigation. The
peience of insanity is emphatically a science of observation,
and no past age has fornished the facility for observation
provided by the infirmary, the hospital and the asylum of
this country. If the prediction of Justice Gibson shall be
verified, it will be because the simplifiers are shut out from
the investigation, because the difficulty of the attainment is
admitted by those engaged in its accomplishment, because
every step of progress will be a step of caution, in order that
it may be a step of safety. No investigator will make real

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